DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL - ENTER:lapidarium

ENTER:lapidarium

 

DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL

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Opening: Friday, June 09, 2023, 6 - 9 p.m.

Exhibition: June 10 - July 22, 2023.

 

 

"It (is) always about my contemporaneity. To observe and classify what it means to be a body in Western society. A body that causes systems to be questioned, but still exists as a body (...)" (Daniel M.E. Schaal, 2023)

 

 

We are very pleased to present "ENTER:lapidarium", the first representative solo exhibition of the artist DANIEL M.E. SCHAAL.

 

In accordance with the exhibition title (*"Lapidarium" = the accumulation of sculptures, objects or fragments historically relevant or even consecrated to a place), the visitor is taken on a journey of process-oriented as well as conceptual works that express their narrative in the snapshots of Schaal's impressively large media diversity. This occurs, for example, as painting on canvas, as singular as well as serial prints on handmade paper and cardboard, or it transforms itself as a monumental hand-woven textile floating freely in front of the wall.

 

Already in his student days at the UdK Berlin, the artist gained first public attention due to his collaboration in the performance duo SANDER/SCHAAL as well as through his fascinating prints. In the gallery, a paper web measuring more than 20m is installed above head height and runs the entire length of the exhibition space. In this way Daniel M.E. Schaal explodes the usual format and the visitor can process and participate along the space-time continuum of his body performance. On the downward facing side of the image, the textures of packaging and cardboard boxes reproduced in the printing process can be found and allow reflection on individual biographical processes and behavior in a consumerist society.

 

"I am fascinated by all the materials that circulate in our daily lives. (...) What we want to be, what I think we want to preserve: It is in the numerous packaging materials that circulate around the world every day. But the desired content is ephemeral, its ascribed value usually no higher than that of its original packaging after a very short time." (Daniel M.E. Schaal, 2022)

 

As in his art, there is less of a main path in the biography of Daniel M.E. Schaal than a series of intersecting and interpenetrating side paths. For example, Daniel M.E. Schaal, born near Stuttgart in 1990, graduated in the summer of 2022 with a degree in fine arts from Prof. Valerie Favre. Previously, he earned a bachelor's degree in theater studies at Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (2014), a bachelor's degree in Fb. Kunstwissenschaft and Kunst im Lehramt at the Humboldt University Berlin and the UdK Berlin (2017, 2019). In his school years, Schaal's focus was on music and he took a music baccalaureate with a focus on piano. The artist soon plans to rewrite his long printed trajectories on paper as a score and have them performed by musicians.

 

Against the background of his musical education as well as his experience in the field of stage and theater, Daniel M.E. Schaal's artistic works can be seen as a kind of staging. His tapestry, which floats freely in front of the wall in the entrance area of the gallery, measures a monumental 3.20 m and bears the title "RE_(T)". With the abbreviation "RE" the artist refers to a back-reference, respectively the reuse of "(T)" = textiles. As in his prints on paper, Daniel M.E. Schaal also uses autobiographical materials for his tapestry - namely his worn-out clothes. The favorite colors of his everyday wardrobe seem to be a dark blue, as well as various light-dark gradations of gray. Each textile was cut into narrow strips, with no regard for seams, embroidered logos, or the like. A small weaving frame for children was used by Schaal to weave the small-format individual pieces, which in the end were combined into an abstract composite and sewn together. The supposed valuation of brand-name clothing is thus absorbed into a universal work of art that undermines any differentiation of status and origin.

 

Obviously, the artistic work of Daniel M.E. Schaal is characterized by the strategy and staging of the act of repetition. In the individual work the repetition inform always of the same motif makes itself felt - whether as a reprint of the same pattern (e.g. the cardboard boxes) or in the repetition of the same form, namely the drawing of lines in his works on canvas. In fact, Schaal's paintings resemble a full fabric that suggests an indeterminable, infinite space. Thus, the artist uses a small brush and, for example, a neon red to draw lines across the canvas from one edge of the painting to the opposite edge. The lines are sometimes thicker and sometimes thinner in the ductus and are like an onomatopoeia, which sometimes swells and swells again. Sometimes more densely set and then again with a larger gap-like distance, actually crossing each other at right angles in the direction, and then sometimes breaking off again halfway...; in this way the lines lose themselves in the unknown space. This "space" is often a dark, here bluish black, whose supposed depth is momentarily lightened by the crossing points of the lines like tiny electrical contacts or like exposed synapses. It is as if the viewer's eye gets lost in an impenetrable matrix of 0 and 1. Appropriate to the work series title: "BOAZ" - "Beyond One And Zero".

 

Daniel M.E. Schaal's strategy of constant repetition gives the viewer the feeling that the artist is operating within the framework of a self-defined system with endlessly new series of experiments or following a ritual. In this act of repetition, the autobiographical experiences a transformation into something socially available. And through the ritual of repetition it is as if all distinction of status between subject and object is abolished. Through the ritual of repetition and the multi-layered superimposition of the same motif, a symbolic cycle between becoming and transience unfolds, a reflection on trace and meaning, on our actions in the public and private spheres. In his work as an artist, Daniel M.E. Schaal replaces personal expression with performative imprinting. In this way he creates a symbiosis between image and body, which leads to the new aesthetic of an anthropological abstraction.

For according to French art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud, artists are the anthropologists of our new relational landscape.

"Against the devitalization of the world, art succeeds in preserving certain aspects of the social function and spiritual practices of our societies and in stitching together torn links." (NBourriaud, "Inclusions Aesthetics of the Capitalocene," 2022/23).